Ranting Against Higher Education

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(By Andrew MacKie-Mason)

Robert Koons (Philosophy, UT-Austin) doesn't like the current state of American higher education. On its own, that's fair; like any institution formed by human beings, higher education has significant room for improvement. But Koons' concerns about the system have been so colored by partisanship and his opinions are expressed with such unjustified vitriol and unwarranted over-generalization that he adds nothing to any serious conversation.

One of Koons' main themes is laid out in this paragraph:

We can best understand the modern university by seeing it as built on the synthesis of these two tendencies, Baconian and Rousseauan. We now justify the hard sciences almost entirely in pragmatic and utilitarian terms, as the incubators of technology, not as observatories from which to behold and contemplate the music of the spheres. In contrast, many in the humanities, as well as most in the new fields of “communications” and “education,” have abandoned the hard road of fact to become the playgrounds of “values.”

 Can anyone who actually examines the way universities actually work take this seriously? It's true that many people outside of higher education (especially conservatives, it seems to me) claim that the hard sciences are more important than the humanities because they are more pragmatic. But those in academia understand that the value of all disciplines rests on the higher callings of human nature. Modern society may have mostly rejected the (misguided) teleology that Koons wants to return to, but it is fallacious to assume that the death of teleology leaves nothing but pragmatism and utilitarianism. And while the humanities are undoubtedly tackling the fundamental questions of value more directly than they have in the past, it does not follow (as Koons goes on to claim) that "each professor of the humanities is free to make the classroom into a laboratory of untrammeled fantasy." Questioning things as fundamental as value systems involves the recognition that human abilities are severely limited. There are no "facts" we can be completely certain about, and so we must leave ourselves open, at least hypothetically, to questioning everything. But it is once again fallacious to conclude that no norms whatsoever can survive.

Koons also offers a weird view of what he calls the "elective system" in modern universities.

Eliot’s elective system at Harvard was in part a curricular consequence of Rousseau’s philosophy. The student is “compelled to be free” by being denied the opportunity to undertake a coherent and well-ordered course of study. As Babbitt notes, Rousseau is essentially the resurrection of ancient Greek sophism. Translated into education, the result is what Babbitt calls “the democracy of studies.” The modern university is a mere cafeteria of courses, with no structure or principle of selection. Plato also predicted this outcome in The Laws (819A): schooling as “encyclopedic smattering and miscellaneous experiment.” Babbitt observes that a bachelor’s degree now means “merely that a man has expended a certain number of units of intellectual energy on a list of elective studies that may range from boiler-making to Bulgarian. . . . a question of intellectual volts and amperes and ohms.”

Perhaps there are universities and majors of which this is an accurate description. But limited in that way, Koons' claim isn't that interesting. All he would be able to conclude is that modern universities allow students the opportunity to get a credential without learning anything. That has its downsides, especially in that it significantly decreases the signalling value of the credential. But it is a far cry from the claim that Koons wants to make; namely, that students are "denied the opportunity to undertake a coherent and well-ordered course of study." This is true, he claims, because "the modern university is a mere cafeteria of courses, with no structure or principle of selection." In this piece, Koons is championing critical thought, so it seems fair to take him at his word. He is making an absolute claim and failing to moderate it at all; in that, he is certainly false.

Take two examples. The first is one of my majors at the University of Chicago: mathematics. The major (the BA track) requires the completion of introductory science (chemistry or physics) and calculus sequences begun as general education required of all students in the College. It requires completion of year long (3 quarters) sequences in real analysis and algebra. Those requirements (including the whole science and calculus sequences) add up to about 29% of the courses required for graduation. The major also requires six electives in certain departments (two in math, four in other fields). One can certainly argue about whether this major requires too much, too little, or just the right amount of structure and flexibility. But there is no way to seriously characterize it as a "mere cafeteria of courses, with no structure or principle of selection."

The second example is the English major at Koons' own University of Texas-Austin. I selected this specific major because Koons' calls out professors of literature for special criticism in this section of his article. I didn't screen UT-Austin majors for one with sufficient structure. Anyways, the UT-Austin English major requires several specific introductory courses, then it requires a selection of literature and language courses spanning very specific time frames. It requires a course in "diverse perspectives" (basically a requirement to step outside the traditional "great works" format), as well as a course that focuses closely either on one or two authors and a research seminar. This structure accounts for half of the required courses in the English department. Again, one can argue over whether there is enough structure, or the right kind of structure. But if Koons values precision in his claims, there is no way he should claim that modern universities have "no structure." Doing so is simply lazy.

It is here, perhaps, that an examination of Koons' view of a university's function might be illustrative.

Universities are prestige factories. It is in the admissions office, and not in the classroom, that most of the value of the B.A. is generated. Once a student is in, all he has to do is spend four to six years jumping through a series of arbitrary and undemanding hoops in order to claim a prestigious credential. What he actually learns or doesn’t learn during that period is irrelevant. There is a complete disjunction between the real business of the university (viz., creating and maintaining prestige) and the teaching of undergraduates.

The claims here are a bit hard to unwrap, but let's try. What does Koons mean when he refers to the "value of the B.A." and whether or not the learning of students is "relevant"? He certainly isn't referring to the real value or real relevance. Instead, he seems to be making a (basically true) market-centric claim. The economic, market value of a B.A. is mostly determined in the admissions office, that's fair. And actual learning is basically irrelevant to the economic, market value of the B.A.

But does that tell us anything about how we ought to structure universities? Not really. The ways in which the market chooses to value university degrees is (largely) outside of universities' control. If there is a market failure here, and I would agree with Koons that there is one, the problem lies in American free (or not so free) markets, not in the universities. That's why it's so weird for Koons to call satisfying market demands the "real business of the university." That may be the economic model on which it survives, but it is not, and has never been, the real business of a university properly conceived.

Koons turns next to the lack of workload for modern college students.

The collapse of standards generates an inordinate amount of free time for students, liberated from the “burden” of studying (reading and writing), as documented by the recent book by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.[13] The authors found that 32 percent of the students they studied did not take any courses with forty pages or more of reading per week, and 50 percent did not take a single course in which they wrote more than twenty pages during the semester. The authors also report that students spend an average of only thirteen hours per week studying—50 percent less than a few decades ago, and much of that minimal studying occurs in fashionable but inefficient group settings.

Again, there's some truth to this concern. College standards and workloads probably are falling, though I'm not well-versed enough in the literature on that question to make a useful judgment. But again, it does not follow that the problem is in the universities. It could just as easily (perhaps more easily) be in the students.

Universities, like many human institutions, can be utilized in different ways. Universities can create the opportunity for students to challenge themselves intellectually, but they cannot force their students to accept the challenge. The character of students — their willingness to work at their education — is largely determined by the time they get to college. Giant social disinvestment in primary and secondary education, driven by conservative valorization of pay-for-results private education, is destroying the foundation on which intellectual character is built. We cannot look to universities to solve a social problem that is much deeper and more fundamental than they are.

Koons' proposed solutions are little better than his attempts at describing the current state of American higher education.

He wants to replace public universities with scholarships for academic merit, an idea that will do much to perpetuate privilege and wealth in this country, but little to promote intellectual growth.

He wants to employ greater standardized testing for university students. It's almost as though he wants us to forget all the talk earlier about the value of a university education being non-pragmatic, because now he wants us to think that its value can effectively be measured by a standardized exam. We can't effectively measure the value of second-grade with standardized tests.

He wants to replace current distribution requirements with a Core that focuses entirely on Western Civilization, as though the West has said everything useful that has ever yet been said.

And he wants to eliminate the tradition of original research in the humanities, replacing it with mere "understanding, reflection, and articulation" of classic texts. Who needs another Immanuel Kant. After all, everything useful that will ever be said has already been said.

There is much more that is wrong with Koons' piece than I can address here. There is also, of course, much that is right. There are things that need to be changed about higher education, and there are conversations that need to be had. But Koons' piece is not a valuable contribution to any serious attempt to fix the problems of higher ed.